Mobile World Congress – M-payments ready to Ramblas?

I trust you are all packed and ready for Mobile World Congress? The giant mobile jamboree gets going on Monday (well Sunday night for most of us) and, even if you aren’t in mobile, some of the things that are going to be happening out there in sunny (hopefully) Barcelona are going to impact the telemedia business – or certainly the consumer facing end of it – with gusto.

While much hype attends the launch of new tablets and much attention will be focussed on the Planet of the Apps up in Hall 7, what is really the key theme for MWC this year – for our industry, at least – is the explosion of mobile billing, payment and wallets being rolled out at the show.

Since the start of the year the idea of mobile payments has shifted from being something that would no doubt arrive at some point, to being something that we will see this year. T-Mobile-Orange-Barclaycard’s promise to have a phone based, NFC enabled payment network up and running across the UK ‘by the summer’ was certainly the starting gun. Judging by the press material coming across our desks here at Telemedia-news in the run up to the show, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was Mobile Billing World Congress.

There are a range of NFC-based payment services being toutes, by operators, OEMs and platform providers; there are point of sales (PoS) systems that now take mobile payment through Bluetooth and even bump; there are a host of mobile wallet products aimed at everyone from apps builders and brands, to handset makers, to service providers, to network operators and on to banks.

Then there are the other, more traditional mobile payment tools, such as WAP billing products like the UK’s Payforit, as well as some companies even touting that PSMS billing has a place (well, it does, but do we really want everyone to know?). In short, by this summer – if not by the end of next week in theory at least – mobile devices will be payment tools.

This is all great news for the telemedia community as it once again puts what we’ve been doing for media, brands, service providers and content owners for years in the forefront of the world’s eyes. Get acceptance for mobile as a payment tool and the world is, to coin a phrase, your clam-shell.

The fly in the ointment is that many telemedia players are going to have to box clever to take advantage of this broadening of the reach of mobile billing. Clever get around such as using in-app billing as a payment tool, or apeing what Starbucks has done and turn an app into a barcode based payment offering allow telemedia billers to get some traction at the shop front.

But, while this opens up huge opportunities in the real world, many may find that their traditional home – the virtual online world – may start to see a plethora of competing, and often much more ‘mainstream’, billing options start to impinge on the traditional territory of PRS.  What the industry needs is to look at how to use what it does best to steal a march on the convenience of the mobile wallet or the mobile chip and PIN device. It can be done, and hopefully post MWC, we will start to see this is in action. We also hope that at Telemedia’s own ‘World Congress – T360 in Leeds and World Telemedia Amsterdam in May and October respectively – we will explore this brave new world. Happy shopping.